Deccan Chronicle 19.11.2009

People ready to pay for hygiene

Nov.18: Defecation in the open started everywhere in the world with the advent of a new civilisation. Europe, the US and Australia solved the problem with the help of sewerage system and septic tanks.

Some 2.6 billion people in Asia, Africa and Latin America do not have access to safe and hygienic toilets. In the late 1960s, when I came on the scene in India, we had four problems: (i) No house in rural areas had a toilet; women had to suffer the most because they had to go out before sunrise or after sunset. Sometimes they had to face criminal assault, snake and scorpion bites. Girls did not go to school as no schools had toilet facilities; (ii) The mortality rate was high because of diarrhoea and dehydration; (iii) Most houses in urban areas used to be served by bucket toilets cleaned manually by human scavengers. Because of this, human scavengers used to be insulted, humiliated and hated by the people and were called “untouchables,” (iv) Public places like railway stations, bus-stops, religious and tourist places had no public toilets. Hence foreigners were reluctant to come to India.

I was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and I started fulfilling his dream of clean sanitation and restoration of human rights and dignity of the “untouchable” scavengers.

I developed the design of Sulabh, a twin-pit, compost, flush toilet which replaced the manual cleaning of human excreta by scavengers and also helps to stop defecation in the open, thereby relieving scavengers from their demeaning practice.

I gave them education and vocational training, encouraged them to have social interaction with the elite class of people in society, thus bringing them into the mainstream of society.

I introduced the system of maintenance of public toilets in 1974 on pay-and-use basis for the first time in Patna, Bihar. People joked about who would pay for the use of toilets when they wouldn’t even pay for a rail or bus ticket.

On the first day, 500 persons used the toilets and paid for it. Now this concept has been accepted throughout the country and people are paying for the use of toilets. Sulabh alone has installed 1.2 million individual toilets in houses and more than 7,000 public toilets throughout the country.

I have developed the system of biogas digester with effluent treatment plant. The human excreta is fully recycled. Biogas is used for burning lamps, warming oneself, cooking and providing street lighting, and the effluent is treated, bringing its biochemical oxygen demand to 1 mg/l, fit for discharge in rivers/water bodies.

This technology worked very well in Kabul, Afghanistan, when the temperature went down to -300 in 2007.

Toilets have also been put up in Bhutan. We have trained engineers and others from 14 countries of Africa in these technologies.

(The writer is founder of Sulabh International Social Service Organisation)